Now, of course, in order to experience what is before him, the artist has mainly to look; and looking, finally, is an unaggressive activity. One does not say to one’s eyes, ‘go out and do something to that thing out there.’ One looks, looks long, and the world comes in. There is an important Chinese term, wu-wei, ‘not doing’, the meaning of which is not ‘doing nothing’, but ‘not forcing’. Things will open up of themselves, according to their nature.

The sin of inadvertence – not being alert, not quite awake – is the sin of missing the moment of life; whereas the whole of the art of the non-action that is action (wu-wei) is unremitting alertness. One is then fully conscious all the time, and since life is an expression of consciousness, life is then lived, as it were, of itself. There is no need to instruct it or direct it. Of itself it moves. Of itself it lives. Of itself it speaks and acts.